Should Oprah Run For President? Here's What To Read
Last night, Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, delivering a rousing speech that many deemed presidential in tone. In the wake of Winfrey's well-received speech, two of her "close" friends told CNN that she is "actively thinking" about a presidential run, and her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, fanned rumors by telling the LA Times, "It's up to the people. She would absolutely do it." Should Democrats hop on the Oprah train, or is the speculation about President Winfrey a sign that America's political institutions are irrevocably damaged? Here are six arguments about Winfrey's speech and her fitness for office to help you sort out your thoughts.
'The Serious Case For Oprah 2020'
It turns out no one needed to write the pro-President-Oprah hot take after her Golden Globes appearance, because Bill Scher already did it for Politico last March. Scher favorably compared Winfrey's achievements to Trump's — before acknowledging that her lack of governing experience might be a bit of a liability.
She outshines Trump's private-sector career on several fronts. Trump leveraged his daddy's inheritance to become a billionaire, despite a sloppy management style and several high-profile business disasters along the way. Winfrey, meanwhile, survived poverty, childhood sexual abuse and workplace sexual harassment to become the world's first black female billionaire.
The Oprah Winfrey Foundation runs circles around the Trump Foundation, and has given her some actual experience in education and housing policy. Winfrey has built 60 schools in 13 countries, including her signature educational endeavor, The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, a boarding school for impoverished South Africans. (The first group of her students graduated from American colleges last year.) After Hurricane Katrina, she invested $10 million of her own money and partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build a planned community in Houston, "Angel Lane," housing 65 families displaced by the storm. And she has donated to more than 80 charitable organizations in her adopted hometown of Chicago, whereas evidence of Trump's charitable donations is infamously thin.
'The Case Against President Oprah'
Today, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith elaborated on the most obvious case against Winfrey running for president: Most Democrats want to reject the legitimacy of a celebrity running for president, not endorse it.
[I]f there's one thing you don't hear Democrats saying these days, it's "we need our own Donald Trump." And the ultimate case for Oprah is just that: Normal politics and politicians have failed, celebrity politics has triumphed, and Democrats need to look to the new model…
So the case against Oprah is just that: She may, in fact, be what Trump pretends to be — a self-made business success story whose words resonate across the country. But Democrats don't want to improve on Trump. They want to reverse him. And that's where governors and senators with deep experience, proven political chops, and an unglamorous sense of normalcy come in.
[BuzzFeed]
'Get A Grip, People. Oprah Should Not Run For President.'
The Washington Post's Paul Waldman similarly argues that Democrats ought to look for a qualified public servant, not just a celebrity with a high approval rating, for its 2020 candidate. Waldman also points out that Winfrey's history of promoting dubious programs and products on her talk show calls her judgment into question.
Oprah has spent a career talking on television and connecting with audiences, and she's very good at it. On the other hand, I could argue that she should be disqualified simply on the basis of her promotion of "The Secret," a multimedia juggernaut that claimed that the entire universe and every moment of human experience are governed by "the law of attraction." This is the idea that if you wish really hard for something — say, washboard abs or a new Birkin bag — it will, through the magical power created by your thoughts, find its way to you. With Oprah's help, and because America produces an endless supply of gullible nincompoops, "The Secret" was a gigantic hit.
'What The Oprah Boomlet Means For Democrats'
The Atlantic's David Graham astutely observes that the argument over whether Winfrey should run is a proxy for the argument over whether Trump is uniquely unfit for office or just a particularly bad Republican.
If Trump is different in degree, that changes the calculus. If Trump is just an extreme version of a Republican president, then the problem lies less with him personally but with his party. It would matter much less to Democrats whether their candidate can govern than whether their candidate can win. If the Democratic bench is as weak—or more to the point, green—as it seems, there might be a more compelling case for picking a charismatic candidate who happens to be a beloved entertainer. The paradox is that party leaders are the ones putting the most emphasis on Trump as different only in degree, and these party leaders are least likely to embrace a newcomer like Winfrey.
'Oprah, Don't Do It'
Writing for the New York Times opinion section, Thomas Chatterton Williams posits that even talking about President Winfrey is a sign that Democrats have succumbed to Trump's attempt to refashion American politics as a reality TV show.
In a way, the conversation on the left (and the anti-Trump right) around Ms. Winfrey is more troubling than the emotional immaturity and anti-intellectualism pulsing out of the red states that elected Mr. Trump. Those voters have long defined themselves in opposition to the intellectual seriousness Democrats purport to personify.
If liberals no longer pride themselves on being the adults in the room, the bulwark against the whims of the mob, our national descent into chaos will be complete. The Oprah bandwagon betrays the extent to which social causes and identities — and the tribal feelings they inspire — have come to eclipse anything resembling philosophical worldviews.
'Oprah's Real Message'
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick argues that everyone who's wondering whether Winfrey is going to run for president missed the point of her speech. Lithwick contends that Winfrey's core message was encouraging marginalized people to tell their own stories.
What I heard in her speech wasn't a bid to save us all, but rather a powerful charge to the young girls watching at home to tell their own stories, to fight for their own values, and to battle injustices with the certainty that they will be seen and heard.
In a sense, this speech sounded in the key of Obama's famously elusive spur to — as Gandhi urged — "be the change you want to see in the world." …
[W]hat Winfrey and Obama talk about is the limits of top-down power. It is one of the great sins of this celebrity age that we continue to misread this message as a call to turn anyone who tries to deliver it into our savior. When someone tells you "I alone can fix it," you should run screaming for the emergency exits. When someone tells you to get off your ass and fix it yourself, you should think first about running for office yourself.
[Slate]
